12 September 2015

Definitely making progress

My overriding goals this week were just to walk every morning and work on my dissertation every night. I did that. Walking on the treadmill has become such a habit that I am making it a priority. Thursday night was back to school night and I didn't get home until late. I did not prep food for Friday or do any of the normal things. I got up Friday remembering that I had 3 labs to prep that day and kicking myself for not doing while I was at open house. I got up at 4:40, no food ready and a desire to get to school really early to get my labs ready. After getting the bird food ready and grabbing some coffee, I decided that I had enough time to get a short treadmill workout in. I have been doing 20 minutes this week, but thought I'd just do 15. After 15 I said, screw it let's do 20. So I did. I felt so proud of myself. Not only did I make time to get on the treadmill, but I ended up going longer than I planned. And I'm so proud that I made sure to get on every morning this week. You have no idea how proud I am of myself.

I have also made some progress working on my dissertation. I sat down on Monday and started doing some reading. As I was reading I was highlighting and taking notes. When I finished that article, I put the post-its so they stuck out and I could see them and it hit me. I am a visual person. I need notes and hard copies of things that I can write on and refer back to. Why am I trying to fight it??? I do not know. So I started going through all my articles and making notes, adding post-its, organizing them by topic, and adding them to my lit matrix. What I have discovered is multi-fold. I have a lot of good information already. I may have saturated the literature as I keep running across the same articles. I have a lot of duplicates - which pisses me off. But most importantly, my articles have broken down into a number of relevant topics. Who Knew??? The literature is handling itself. I haven't actually started writing, but I plan to this weekend. I'm getting a good idea of where this lit review is heading and the more I read the clearer it becomes.

So I am making huge amounts of progress in both areas of my life and I am super happy about that. The weather here has been horrendous; either humid beyond belief or raining with thunder and lightening. Just crazy. So I haven't walked the dogs much and I'm sad about that. But progress is being made and I'm super happy about that.

I started wearing my Vivofit again, not sure why but I kind of like it. Anyway, here is a chart of my steps for this week: